Ok, I purchased a SparcStation 5 for real cheap and I was expecting to just throw linux on there and use it as a proxy server and gateway. Upon booting the computer I up I find that Solaris 2.6 is still on there! Sweet, ok, well I figure I might as well check out this whole CDE thing, ya know, see whats up...well I need to reset the root password to get into it, but things are looking so bright, here's the problem:

Using a Debian-sparc boot floppy, I managed to get into a linux console. Now from here I ought to be able to do whatever I want, but no. I mount the Solaris drive (mount -t ufs /dev/sda3 /mnt/wherever) and go in to wipe the shadow pass off, but I find that the filesystem has been mounted read-only! Ok, so I guess I have to explicitly mount it r-w? Nope. Even when I tell it to mount in r-w mode I still can't edit damn thing on the drive. And thats the point I'm at now...

As you come from the land of the DMCA, I would be careful with what you are doing. Theoretically, you are attempting to subvert the security on digital information which you do not own, on an OS you presumably do not have a license for (although you do own the hardware).

If the former owner of the machine has sensitive data on there and decides to get uppity, you could be in for some annoying moments in the land of "over-react first, understand later".

I managed to install Gentoo on one of these things once. It was a real pain in the ass and in the end, after it was finally able to boot by itself, I kept getting seg faults whenever I would try to compile stuff. Long story short, I just gave up on it. Perhaps the SPARC32 support has gotten better and it will work right now, I dunno. I managed to boot off of the Gentoo Sparc 1.4 test CD and install Linux from that. Not sure if that would help you to mount the partitions though._________________Meh.

Hehe, aja, you raise an excellent point, perhaps I should just go about my buisness and wipe the drive to put LInux on it...though with what little snooping I've done so far it looks like the farthest the previous owner got was to install internet explorer for solaris (i.e. there is little actual data in the home directories).
Nonetheless, I will heed your warning and let solaris go...

As to your comment, sisyphus, I didn't realize I could just download 8 on their website, though I should have clarified and said I don't have a CD-Rom in this puppy...perhaps when I get one, then I can play with solaris! Now there's an idea I can live with!